An Information Week article on corporate use of blogs:
What are the selling points for using weblogs inside a company? Ease of use, for starters. “It really doesn’t take much in terms of learning to get people up to speed,” John Robb says. With their focus on a single person’s point of view, weblogs are distinctly different from bulletin boards and discussion threads, which are group-oriented. And practitioners say weblogs are less disruptive than E-mail, which can demand hours of attention during the course of a day.
weblogs can trigger a rich chain reaction of ideas and possibilities, which is why they hold such great potential for the workplace. Give individual employees within a company their own weblogs, encourage them to document their best ideas and personal experiences, link them, add search capabilities, and it’s easy to imagine that at least some innovation will arise from the ordinary.
For companies that go down this path, the trick is to capitalize on the mental energy that’s unleashed by blogging. In the business world, after all, the destination counts more than the personal journey.
Corporate cultures will need to change if blogging is to fulfill its promise as a tool for collaborative business. There’s a “reluctance to open the floodgates of letting opinions fly around and not be able to control that,” Chen says…Companies that blog need to be prepared for the bad ideas, disagreements, and general dissonance that might also be generated by the system…The flip side of blogging for business innovation would be this: hours wasted recording, reading, and responding to low-value meanderings. There’s a risk of getting bogged down in blogs.
In the next week or so, we are going to open up blogs within our company. Lets see what happens!
